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Company Secrets: Ballet Unfiltered
Pull back the curtain on the professional dance world.
Hosted by Jared Redick, Company Secrets features candid conversations with Artistic Directors and industry leaders who share the real stories behind auditions, casting, company life, and artistic vision.
From navigating contracts to embracing career pivots, this podcast offers insider knowledge for young dancers striving to thrive in the ballet world—and for anyone who loves the art form and wants to understand what really happens behind the scenes.
Whether you're a student, educator, emerging artist, or lifelong fan, Company Secrets is your backstage pass to the dance world’s most essential conversations.
🎧 Season One: New episodes every Tuesday beginning August 5th!
Company Secrets: Ballet Unfiltered
S2 EP10: The Nutcracker Paradox- De-Centering the Nutcracker with Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild
In this episode of Company Secrets: The Nutcracker Paradox, Jared Redick is joined by renowned dance scholar and cultural critic Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild for a bracing conversation about why The Nutcracker may no longer deserve its outsized place in American ballet culture.
Rather than arguing for yet another reinvention of the holiday classic, Dixon-Gottschild challenges the field to de center The Nutcracker altogether, questioning its cultural neutrality, its mythologized role as an entry point, and the disproportionate time, money, and discourse it absorbs. She reframes the ballet as a uniquely American obsession, likening it to a kind of institutional Santa Claus that is comforting, lucrative, and rarely interrogated.
Drawing on personal history, scholarship, and decades of observing the field, Dixon-Gottschild explores issues of access, class, Eurocentric validation, and whose stories are perpetually foregrounded or ignored. Together, she and Jared ask what might become possible if ballet organizations invested the same energy in living artists, diverse communities, and multiple traditions as they do in preserving a single seasonal ritual.
This episode is not about canceling The Nutcracker. It is about loosening its grip, expanding our imagination, and making space for many nutcrackers, many audiences, and many futures for dance.